As part of a recent project, I needed to check if a file existed before starting an SSIS package to import that file. The catch was that I did not know what time time file was going to be placed on the file system. If the SSIS package runs and the file does not exist [Keep reading…]

This month’s TSQL Tuesday is hosted by Argenis Fernandez. This month’s topic: “blog about your experience. Tell us why you specialized, or why you’d like to specialize. If you don’t think that specialization is a good thing, tell us why. Discuss. Argue your point(s).” ================================================= My first job out of college was a Network Administrator for [Keep reading…]

The topic for this month’s TSQL Tuesday, hosted by Allen White, is an invitation to share your tricks. Before I get into my trick to share, I wanted to mention that Allen is a pretty awesome speaker too. I got to see his session “Gather SQL Server Performance Data with Powershell” at the SQL Saturday [Keep reading…]

This month’s TSQL Tuesday topic, hosted by Stuart Ainsworth, is Joins. I am going to share a story of a performance improvement that I made with joined views. One of the main vendor-built applications that I support has views built on top of tables. Unfortunately that’s not the end of the story. These views are [Keep reading…]

This month’s TSQL Tuesday topic: Data Presentation. I am not going to show any code this month, and I am also going to veer off the topic of SQL server slightly. My company does a lot of reporting though Cognos. The nice thing about Cognos is that it is platform independent. Once a connection is [Keep reading…]

This is my first TSL Tuesday post, and actually my first run at blogging. And on a special new day too! I have been reading other’s blogs for about a year now and thought that perhaps I could contribute something that helps someone else out one day. This month’s T-SQL Tuesday challenge: reveal your crap [Keep reading…]